Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  But my past, I ought to remember it. And I do. I’m sure of it. When I am home I will remember it. When I’m alive. When I look at my photographs. At certain objects, slightly sooty. It is this place that confuses me. In this place the past is not past, it all comes back. And yet not as it was, but as everything here is: changeable, changing. The moving finger writes, and having writ, goes back for edits.

  But why have I chosen to make my life a murder mystery? Could I reshelve myself, so to speak, among the romances or, more suitably—but it is all literature, and all beside the point. Which is: ceasing to “live” in this egregiously personal sense and beginning, at last, to exist. Cutting out the first person like a tumor.

  Only to find that it has metastasized, and that that is precisely what I have called the “world.”

  Then burning the world down to the bone, and starting afresh. With what few scraps of matter remain that I do not recognize, do not understand.

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  The months passed, the years. The stream rose, worried the bank, sank back. Summers it thinned to a shimmer. I was no longer the new girl. I became, if not liked, accepted. I even forged a combative sort of friendship with Dixon, often arguing with her in private over points of doctrine. It was a relief, I think, for both of us. By unspoken agreement, we took turns arguing the side of the Headmistress, so that the other might give her skepticism vent, and so stropped our tongues to a razor’s edge, which stood us in good stead in class. From time to time we broached again the topic of the racial typology of the dead, without reaching any great conclusions, except to agree that it was strange that white folk were not more fearful of the ghosts of those they had wronged. Wasn’t channeling the dead about reckoning with the past? Did they never consider, those earnest seekers who engaged our graduates, that the dead might come not in benevolence but in wrath, and shouldering aside the deceased daughters in their winding cloths, the fathers, sons, and mothers, seek the vengeance they were due? We did not acknowledge what is obvious enough in retrospect, that we took in these speculations a fearful pleasure.

  (The one time I tried to raise these questions in class: “Grandison, I am grieved to find that you have adhesions.”

  “Adhesions?”

  “You are clinging to the small potatoes of self. Put them aside, girl.”

  “Potatoes?”)

  A filmmaker arrived for a visit, then moved in, bunking uncomplaining with the boys. The doctor began to dodder and acquired a protégé. We all admired Dr. Peachie, who was young and keen and flatteringly attentive to us kids. The girls in particular fluttered around him, and though his manners were unfailingly correct, I saw how his throat flushed and one knee jittered when Marigold perched on the arm of his chair, or laid a daring hand on his sleeve. Whenever he made his rounds, a group of girls would troop around after him asking questions and taking it in turns to try on his stethoscope and peep through his magnifying glass. Does it sound like I was indifferent? I was not, though both too reticent and too proud to play the coquette. One day he met my eyes where I stood on the fringe of the group, and ignoring the hands already reaching for the instrument, extended it toward me. “Would you like a try?”

  Frowning, I held his gaze, trying to identify what it was I saw in it, as my hand drifted toward him. A dark space seemed to have opened up under my ribs, as though a malign sorcery had conjured away my organs. In this hollow an unfamiliar knowledge coiled and snapped.

  Then the Headmistress came around the corner. “What are you doing, Grandison?” she snapped. “Let us get to work.” After that, when I saw the doctor, though my eyes tried to jump to his, I turned away. But I always knew where he was, without looking. I thought he was aware of me in the same way and that the distance we kept between us was like the space between two cupped hands that shelter a tiny flame.

  Sometimes when I lay alone I allowed myself the thought of Dr. Peachie and the look he had leveled at me, and I imagined various maladies that might require me to undress myself before those eyes and take shameless positions with an inventiveness I recalled later with hot disbelief. Once I dreamed that he was capering in a scarlet union suit with a giant pair of tongs, and wagging his pointed tail at me, and that I opened my mouth willingly for the tongs. When with a yank that throbbed through my whole body he pulled out my tongue, I woke up in the thought that I had pissed myself, but it was not urine that wet my thighs.

  Europe went to war; “I knew it,” said the Headmistress, when the news was brought to her, “by the souls flooding into death.” Dr. Peachie began his study of ectoplasmoglyph production, and often pulled expecting pupils into the room he called his office—though not without a wary look around, for the Headmistress regarded every glyph as a telegram from some metaphysical front, and resented any delay in its delivery. A tall, sleek girl with glossy, protuberant eyes—I think her name was Candace—got pregnant by someone she refused to name (a revolting hypothesis came to me, but I shooed it away), miscarried, and either was possessed by that tiny, speechless ghost or went mad, no one was sure. A car took her away. Another car came for a shy boy with leukemia who returned six months later, no longer shy, as a particularly plaintive and persistent ghost, availing himself of every open mouth to complain monotonously about a cold draft for a period of some months before at last falling silent.

  One day the ghost of a foul-mouthed Scottish stonemason whom Chin-Sun was cultivating advised a small group of us of the exact whereabouts in nearby Greenfield of a buried boot full of money, which we duly located on one of the days off allowed to trusted senior students. Its contents, $1.83 in small change, we spent on ice cream sodas and candy.

  One day Ramshead, possibly sleepwalking, drifted spectrally up the length of the dormitory to the side of my bed as I watched, then plopped on top of me, groping me here and there, and tried to put her tongue in my mouth. After a dumbstruck minute I pushed her away.

  More often it was Bernadette who came, she who had struck against me in the driveway the day I came. She had grown into a long broad-shouldered girl with white eyelashes and perpetually chapped lips who produced more mouth objects than anyone. She’d sit astride me, knees pinning my nightgown to the bed, and talk in a rasping whisper as tiny wet objects fell out of her mouth onto me and I’d laugh and build stacks of them on my chest while she whispered on, a dark swaying shape, and more things dropped and knocked down my fortifications. Without knowing exactly what I was doing, I was feeling my way along a line of inquiry that seemed threaded through the pit of my stomach and thrummed tightly there. An investigation that had begun, perhaps, with that glance from the doctor. Sometimes I allowed myself to imagine that it was he who sat over me thus, and then the two figures, male and female, seemed to mingle and vie, so that it was sometimes one of them, sometimes the other, and sometimes two in one that straddled me, while I was myself but also Marigold and for fleeting moments, even the disgraced Candace. The excited ghosts shushed and tittered and whirled through and around our mouths, but oh, we living, were we not already as good as ghosts?

  One day she leaned over and brought her face so close to mine that our noses bumped. Her breath was in my mouth and it made me feel fizzy and at the same time serious. Then she said something. I couldn’t hear what it was, but I felt it, a tiny object dropped into my mouth. My tongue found out the shape of it. It was only a little bigger than a tooth, but more complicated. Having it in my mouth was also complicated.

  Bernadette got off and lay down beside me on her back. I sucked and wondered. The object—ectoplasmoglyph—word?—tasted salty, bready, internal. Sucking it was like being about to speak, but not knowing what you were going to say. I said to myself, It’s on the tip of my tongue. It in this case being Bernadette, but a part of her she didn’t know any better than I did. That was a different angle on knowing someone than I was used to, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. What if you knew someone’s insides so well that you forget their outside? And what if th
eir outside was what made you want to know them in the first place? I saw the Headmistress shaking her head and saying, “Let us get to work,” and in the end I fished out the word and felt for Bernadette’s damp hand. I guess she thought for a moment that I wanted to hold hands and then felt the word there. She never came back to my bed and a month later she had graduated. On the whole, I was glad.

  I pitched myself into my work. Gradually, insensibly, my Voice became my voice. In practicing hush and rueing speech, in courting trouble and shunning ease, I had built myself a home of stumbling blocks. No fiend could now pluck out my tongue, for I had plucked it out myself. But I used the absence of a tongue more ably than I had ever used the living organ.

  One day, I was typing a clean copy of a letter when, without looking up from the handwritten page from which she was reading, the Headmistress said, “What do you want?”

  “What do,” I typed, before I realized that the question was addressed to me. Sighing, I pulled the page out of the machine and started scrolling in a fresh one. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Her head came up. “What nonsense. I mean what you think I mean. What do you want? To conquer death? Say bye-bye to Mama? Find yourself? Lose yourself?” Seeing my blank look, she added, “Let me make it simpler. To go home, or to leave home forever?”

  Which answer would she herself give? To leave home, I thought. But hadn’t she made herself a home of the school, with herself in loco parentis?

  “Both,” I finally said, because it was true. The two were even, I would later decide, the same thing. To run away from everything, even my own self, was to find a home I could never lose, because it was loss itself.

  Readings

  Documentarian of the Dead

  The provenance of this text deserves special mention. I was drawn by a passing mention of the Vocational School to an online forum dedicated to that particular form of one-upmanship engaged in by film buffs that consists of the laudatory mention of ever more obscure films. Someone had met someone who had heard of someone who had abandoned work on a documentary about a very early filmmaker (name of Moe Decker or something like that) but was still sitting on some rare footage shot at the Vocational School or environs. There was alleged to be a script. But it was no use asking to see it, the guy was a crank, not Moe Decker but the other one, had never made a film, did not know the first thing about film, except the films of Moe Decker, on whom he was the world’s leading expert, in fact the world’s only expert, having bought sight unseen and at a sucker’s price a mess of decaying film reels that proved unbeknownst to the seller to contain the only copies extant of Decker’s masterpieces. Well, I tracked him down and persuaded him that he owed his insights to scholarship. The following text appears first here. —Ed.

  “I came to the Sybil Joines Vocational School with one object,” wrote Aaron Moedeker in his abandoned memoirs, “to gain access to sights that, if they proved susceptible to capturing on film, would surely be the strangest and most wonderful ever to be impressed on celluloid.”

  In October 1915, with the aid of the school’s experienced necrotechs, an ambitious young amateur filmmaker from California began making exploratory trips beyond the veil with a hand-cranked motion picture camera. After every visit to the land of the dead he would take detailed notes from memory, play and replay the footage (if any), and modify his equipment accordingly. The first trip from which he returned with exposed film took place around August 1916; before then, though the camera was running, the film remained blank. The first footage to present such fluctuations of light and dark as to suggest an image—in which, however, only the vaguest hints of figuration can be made out—was filmed in September 1916, almost a year after his earliest experiments. Oddly enough, it was recorded from within a sealed film canister that remained in Moedeker’s backpack for the duration of the trip.

  Encouraged by this accidental success, Moedeker broadened the scope of his experimentation. To this period belongs the series of increasingly unusual motion picture cameras at which so much fun has been unjustly poked—the wax camera, the ice camera, the camera with no crank or lens, the diagram of a camera on a sheet of onionskin paper, the word camera scrawled on a calling card, the description of a camera read aloud. He even attempted to make a camera out of his own body, holding a strip of film in his mouth, which was exposed to light when he spoke. However, it was on an ordinary film camera that the first footage was shot in which anything resembling a landscape could be made out, though it undergoes peculiar convulsions.17

  It turned out that to function beyond the veil, cameras required certain modifications. These seem to add up to a sort of animal disguise: a thick layer of goose fat, a carrying case of pigskin, a lens cover woven from horse or human hair. The film suffered less distortion if it had been breathed on. A small sack of ants tucked into the camera bag seemed to help.

  Other modifications were made by death itself. Moedeker took careful notes of alterations to his equipment discovered on return. Unfortunately in most cases the equipment itself has not survived. We know, however, that his lenses took on a great many fantastic forms. Some sprouted an array of subsidiary lenses, connected to no eyepiece, whose pertinence to the putative footage seemed nil. Extra reels of varying sizes imposed intricate divagations in the path of the scrolling film. Several cameras were lost when they grew pseudopods and ran away. One melted, one burned, one was eaten in a moment of distraction by Moedeker himself, with no ill effects recorded. One divided itself into five hundred tiny cameras with working parts, some of which have been subsequently recovered from dollhouse collectors. One of these was still loaded with miniature strips of film; scholars are still arguing whether the evocative but enigmatic footage recovered from it was shot in the land of the dead, or was the work of some little girl, and the face that some claim to be able to make out, through the pale flicker of celluloid decomposition, merely that of one of her dolls.

  The film and its emulsion also changed, making it hard to determine which visual phenomena were the effects of what we shall resign ourselves to calling “light” (though necronauts say that it no more resembles the light of our world than it does a stomachache or the sound of fingernails clawing at rough deal boards) and which were properties of the film itself—whether Moedeker was creating a record of actual sights, or merely of transformations of the film—or whether it even made any sense to assert a difference between those things. Nor was it clear whether such films should be played on ordinary projectors, or at ordinary speeds—with ordinary light! Or even whether to play the film was actually what one ought to do with it rather than, say, plant it, or boil it in brine, or wrap it around one’s neck and pull, pull hard . . .

  One film grew like a vine, dividing, subdividing, and extending runners; after a late night, Moedeker fell asleep at his desk, and upon waking found that the film had coiled itself around his wrist and a table leg, effectively binding him in place. He was not found until the next day, by which point the film had seized his other wrist and sent an exploratory tendril into his mouth. This film was reportedly destroyed, though a rumor persists that Moedeker could not in the end bear to “kill” it, but hid it in a remote corner of the school basement, where it continued to grow and occasionally claimed a victim in a curious child drawn to such out-of-the-way places.

  One film was transformed into a strip of paper on which a single phrase was printed over and over in capital letters: “THERE IS LAPE,” or possibly, “THERE I SLAPE” (the final word here has been interpreted by some as a nonstandard past tense of sleep). There is lape! The phrase has the ring of revelation. It has even entered popular usage, where it has come to mean something like the give in the grid, the stretch in the hanging rope, the pigeonhole’s back door.

  Belatedly, Moedeker came to believe that all objects altered by exposure to the land of the dead were “footage” and to conceive of the land of the dead as itself a sort of recording. The living play it back, running the past throug
h their mouths, one moveless moment after another. “The challenge is to teach the camera to listen,” Moedeker wrote.

  Pursuing this program, Moedeker for a time confined himself to close-ups of the Headmistress, as she pronounces words we cannot hear. Most of this footage is about as interesting as one would expect, but one reel is different: Between the intermittently parted lips of the subject appear flashes of light that could initially be mistaken for blemishes in the film, but resolve into what seems to be a landscape with distant figures moving across it. Near the end of the footage a large dark shape appears to cross the opening; then one of the small forms in the background grows until it fills the aperture, which goes black. It is virtually impossible not to read this as a figure approaching the Headmistress—or her mouth—from behind, as it were, and presumably without her knowledge. Some viewers have found themselves pressing themselves back in their seats, as if to escape from whatever is coming, though all that does come is the end of the film.

  Moedeker filmed the living as well as the dead, shooting many hours of footage of daily life at the Vocational School. But distinguishing these reels is curiously difficult. Are these a row of scuffed and battered shoes, solemnly queued outside a washroom, or the shadowed faces of the watchful dead, who have temporarily mistaken themselves for footwear? Is this unusually clear sequence only what it appears to be, a record of a group of students in school uniform, solemnly performing morning calisthenics in a barren field, their hair still dark and shining from their ablutions, while a couple of donkeys fornicate tremendously in the background, or is this illusory clarity an elaborate instance of pareidolia, the footage actually depicting, who knows, a map tattooed on the palm of a monstrous hand, or a hanging vine on each trembling leaf of which a tiny mouth is opening?